Nokia Lumia 925 Smartphone Review

If you've ever handled a Lumia, you essentially know what you're getting here. There's a big, bold, glossy display with no hardware buttons on the front, a curved, ergonomic chassis, and a bulging camera module in the rear. Traits such as these have defined the Lumia range over the past couple of years, and all of the token characteristics are here on the Lumia 925 as well.


That said, the Lumia 925 does veer off course slightly by introducing a metalic band around the edges, while a soft-to-the-touch polycarbonate battery cover covers almost the entire backside. Up top, there's a micro-SIM slot, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a micro-USB 2.0 port for charging and syncing. There's nary a switch nor socket on the left side, while the right edge is home to the camera shutter button, the on/off power button, and a volume rocker. The bottom edge is clean of ports as well.


The face of the phone is deep black and glossy, with a 4.5" AMOLED WXGA (1280x768) ClearBlack display dominating the area. The screen uses a slab of sculpted Gorilla Glass, and it also boasts "sunlight readability" and touch support for gloves and fingernails -- both of which are nice additions indeed.


On the rear, there's an 8.7MP PureView camera with optical image stabilization, autofocus, 1080p movie capture, and a high-power dual LED flash. Nokia's ace in the hole here is the accompanying Nokia Smart Camera software, which enables burst shooting and all sorts of new capture modes to make the most of low-light situations -- the kinds of areas where most smartphones falter.

At just 129mm x 70.6mm x 8.5mm, the Lumia 925 is markedly thinner than the Lumia 920 and Lumia 1020. We never really had any issues with the heft of prior Lumia phones, but now that we've handled the 925, the prior units do indeed feel overly bulky. This one's sleek, sexy, and barely a burden. As we've come to expect from Nokia, the build quality is exceptional. It truly feels like a premium product in the hand, with every corner and every accent polished in a way that only Apple and few others have managed to match.


Interestingly, Nokia supports contact charging with the Lumia 925, but you'll have to spring for an optional rear cover to make that kind of magic happen. Also, presumably in order to make the 925 thinner, there's only a 2,000mAh battery on-board.


After a week of use, it's easy to say that the Lumia 925 is among our favorite phones to handle, hardware-wise. Nokia has nailed the design execution yet again, and the slim frame of this particular device has really won us over. But then again, Nokia's soft spot has never been the hardware.